Domain Engineering And Agile Software Development

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This page is intended to discuss the question

Is Domain Engineering compatible with Agile Software Development?

Given the current popularity of agile methodologies in the general software development community it is worthwhile to position DomainEngineering appropriately in order to avoid being dismissed as an unworkable, high-ceremony approach. Highly automated software development and the principles of the agile alliance don't have to be exclusice. In practice I found that using model-driven generators naturally leads to agile ApplicationEngineering?, opening up possibilities of domain exploration to application engineers that would be completely impractical in traditional, manually driven software development. Using advanced model-driven generators allows to react to most user requirements changes within hours and days rather than weeks or months, allows to shorten iteration times, and speeds up the user feedback cycle.

The mainstream attitude to generation is reflected in the otherwise excellent book SurvivingObjectOrientedProjects? by AlistairCockburn?:

... my colleages and I estimated that perhaps 5 percent of the total system code could have been generated from the business object model. ... The problem comes when you must add some computation that cannot be generated automatically. At that moment, the drawing of the object model, which moments before was an asset, becomes a liability ...

In short, the state-of-the-art of generative techniques is often judged by what is provided in the better known UML tools such as Rose, Together, and others. Needless to say that this makes it harder to convince traditional development teams that there is something to be gained by DomainEngineering and domain-specific techniques. To counter the simplistic arguments against generative techniques I have compared manual development, "traditional" development with a UML tool, and model-driven development with a modern generator in http://www.softmetaware.com/mda-implementationandmetrics.pdf. The comparison concentrates on the gains achievable by generation, and consciously relies largely on UML-based notations, with only a few domain-specific elements.